Turn Your Doodles Into Printable Greeting Cards

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Kathy. Welcome to turn your doodles into principal greeting cards. If you've taken any of the classes in my Siri's The Art of Doodling, you'll know that doodling can be a great tool for expanding creativity as well as helping with thinking and processing through information. But there's more that you could do with your doodles as well. In this class will be going over one of my favorite ways to make practical use of my trying , and that's to digitize them and turn them into my own greeting parts. We'll go over different ways to go about digitizing your drawings and how to format them, and it will be illustrators so that they're ready to print from home. Here. All you need are a few simple tools, a few simple processes before being able to share any greeting cards that your friends and family will be really excited to receive. 2. Project & Materials: our project for this class will be to create a thank you card. Feel free to convey that in any way that you would like. But before we get started talking about drawing, let's go over the materials you need in this class. The first thing you'll need is Adobe Illustrator, which is the program will be using to format are cards, and you could download a free trial of that with the link that I've included in the project description. Secondly, you'll need a camera. The phone camera works just fine. That's what I use and also some kind of photo editing app. I'll show you what I use, but it could be something really simple as long as you can adjust brightness, contrast and saturation. Finally, you'll need a way to cut a straight line. If you have a paper cutter that would work great. Otherwise, I usually use a cutting board ruler and an Exacto knife. The next step is to draw, and I'll be going through that process along with you guys and just giving some tips along the way. 3. Drawing: Now we're going to create our drawing. We wanna have good contrast for making it or a sizable vector an illustrator. So using a dark pen is best. I'll show you how to color your drawing an illustrator. But do that. Make sure not to leave any gaps in your shapes and connect up all the lines that will be filled with color later from I think you card. I am drawing a cartoon version of myself saying Thank you. My wording here is a little off center, but I'll show you guys an illustrator How to fix that later as well. Next, we're gonna prepare. Are drawing to work with it an illustrator. There are a lot of different ways to go about it, but this is just my own personal process. First I take a picture of my drawing with the white background filling the whole photo screen. Make sure you have good lighting as well, so you can avoid any shadows on your artwork. Next to go into your photo editing app. I'm using a color story, but as long as whatever you're using can adjust brightness contrast in saturation, you're good to go. The first thing I'm gonna do is lower the saturation. So the picture is completely in black and white or shades of gray. Guess. And then I'm gonna adjust the brightness and contrast to accentuate the black and white even more so. There's more contrast between the lines in the background, and ideally, the background will be completely white and the lines will be completely back. Whenever you're ready with that, send it over to yourself through email or airdrop, get it on your computer and will be ready to work with it. An illustrator. 4. Illustrator: let's set up our illustrator file. So I'm opening Illustrator and creating a new document making sure that it's the letter sized art board 11 by 8.5 and for the orientation. If you're planning on your card to be vertical than it's easier to have the orientation of the entire page be vertical. And if you're planning on your card to be horizontal card, it's easier to set it up with horizontal art board. So that's, I mean, keep in mind and just gonna have one art board and making sure it's c n y que color mode. And here we have our file. So the first thing but I'm gonna do is command are which brings up rulers and making shirts and inches. And next I'm gonna check my guides to make sure that they are locked. So we're gonna make some guidelines now to show where the land of the card will be, we're gonna have to cards per page, so we're gonna split this art board into four quadrants. So the first guideline will go to 5.5 inches, just half of 11 and the 2nd 1 will come to 4.25 inches, which is have 8.5. So that's how the pages set up and ready to bring in our artwork. 5. Drawing + Illustrator: Now, this is the fun part where we get to bring in our artwork and form it into a card. I'm going to go intimate us top and drag in the photo that I edited on my phone. It's really large. So I'm gonna zoom out with command minus and the first thing that I want to do is make it a vector. And what that means is that it could be resized without losing any image quality. And the colors of the arbour can also be easily changed as well. So in order to vector rise, the method that I like to use his image trace, you can find it here on the side. And it's also in the drop down above an image trace. I'm gonna choose black and white logo. And now my image has been converted two vectors and I'm gonna click expand up here so that we can see all the points and pieces of the art that have been made in defectors. I'm gonna ungroomed pit. And as you can see, there are these white shapes that are between the lines and I want to delete all of these little pieces to let him left with just the black lines that I can work with. So in order to do that, I'm going to select one of them. And this one is part of the thank you bubble. I'm gonna slug that and then go up to select same appearance. And that picks out all the pieces that have a white fill so I could delete them all at once rather than clicking on each one to delete them one at a time. So with that, I construct them all and let them all. And as you can see now, we just have the block lines left, and it's still a group, so they're kind of floating around. So while it's on grouped, I'm gonna fix my off center. Thank you. And I'm going to select just that portion and resize it and center it, make any other adjustments to the lines. And once I'm happy with how that looks, I can select everything and group it with command G. So now it's a full image that moves around as a single unit, and if you need to adjust anything, you can always un group it again. Toe add color. I'm gonna use the live paint bucket, so select your entire image and click. Why have paint bucket and then click in the space that you want a color. So you construct colors here, and as long as your lines are connected and create a closed space, you can color that space with a live paintbrush. So something to keep in mind while you're drawing is that if you want to add color later on , make sure that you seal up your lines into closed shapes on and just coloring my shirt in cool. So that's done. And I actually want to change the color of the wines and thank you. So I'm gonna double click to, um at it within the group that item and just select what? And I drop my shirt color. Um, by hitting I and that will just pick out the same color as the shirt. So I'm gonna resize this down and bring it over to my art board. I'm gonna zoom in with command Plus, and since I'm doing a horizontal card, I'm gonna imagine the left half as the front and back of the card before they're folded over for a vertical card. It will look like this, and if you put anything on the top half, remember to flip it because it's gonna be folded over in the end and to make sure it's centered something that I like to do, which might not be the most efficient thing to do. But to make sure everything centered, I create a shave the length of the front of the card, select everything that I want to be centered and used the align tools to line them all to the center. And it's easier to see if it starts off a little more off center. But once everything centered, you can duplicate it to the other side to make sure both sides are centered and then delete the guideline shapes. Now we have our two cards set up and ready to be printed in the next lesson will take a look at it after it's printed out. So I'm gonna go put this out just on regular printer paper, and when you're ready, I'll see you in the next video 6. Finishing Touches: now for the finishing touches. I have my little card printed out here. As you can see, there's two of them and I don't have any markers of where to cut. But since I know that it's exactly in half, it'll be easy for me to measure where to cut. I have my cutting board, my Exacto knife, my ruler. So I'm gonna cut down the middle. And first I'm just gonna measure across the top and make a little pencil mark at 5.5, which is where we drew that guideline down the center of our page and illustrated. So make a little mark at the top and one at the bottom, and I'm just gonna line up my ruler besides them. And I'm gonna use my Exacto knife to make a nice clean cut from end to end, using the ruler as a guide for my street line. And now we have two cards and fold them into their card shapes, and I usually like to fold it from with the back facing upward because I'm not new full. There are little some weird creases, and I prefer to have those on the back rather than in the front with main artwork. So I'm gonna fold these up, and they are now completed. Now all you need is in a two envelope, and this will fit perfectly inside. This is not ready for you to gift away. Now you have a thank you card that you can print as many times as you need. Modify and just have something special to give to friends and family. Hope you have fun this class and keep creating.